Saturday, April 30, 2011

Chinese UN policemen run through simulation for the last time before deployment to East Timor. In sum, China has deployed 1,597 policemen for UN peacekeeping missions. I guess that is why some call China a "police state" (bad pun, I know).

A Chinese peacekeeping police squad left Beijing early Tuesday for East Timor to join United Nations missions in the Southeast Asian country.

It is the 15th peacekeeping police squad China has sent to East Timor since 2000.

The 24-member squad included staff from the criminal investigation, public security, and traffic control departments of Shandong Province in eastern China.

Eight out of the 24 police personnel had previously participated in United Nations peacekeeping missions.

With an average age of 34, the squad will replace their counterparts from eastern China's Jiangxi Province, who have been in East Timor since February last year.

According to the Ministry of Public Security, China has sent 1,597 police for UN peacekeeping missions to East Timor, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Liberia, Afghanistan, Haiti and Sudan since January 2000.

Portuguese-speaking East Timor, an island nation at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago and north of Australia, became the first new sovereign state of the 21st century in 2002.

China sent its first batch of peacekeepers to East Timor in January 2000 to help restore security after factional violence.

BEIJING — The J-15 Flying Shark is China’s newest attack jet, a sinuous fighter with the folding wings, shortened tail cone and bulked-up landing gear it needs to serve on China’s first aircraft carrier, which is expected to start sea trials soon. It is indisputable evidence of China’s growing mastery of military technology.

Also military technology of Russia and Ukraine, albeit not entirely with their consent.

Barely two weeks after splashing photographs of the aircraft carrier on the Internet, China’s state media on Monday published the first close-up pictures of the J-15. The day before, Web sites that focus on China’s military had run the same photograph, snapped outside the Shenyang plant in northeast China where the plane is being developed.

Like the aircraft carrier it will call home, the jet faces years of tests and refinement before it will formally enter service, military analysts say. The photographs nevertheless suggest that the People’s Liberation Army, long notoriously secretive, is lifting some veils.

“The recent spate of releases of photographs of airplanes under development is a sign of relaxed control of military information in China,” Lan Yun, an editor at the Beijing-based Modern Ships magazine, said in an interview. “It could be seen as a sign of more transparency of the Chinese military.”

Mr. Lan and Andrei Chang, the Hong Kong-based editor of Kanwa Asian Defense Review, said that the photograph indicated that the aircraft had passed factory tests and was now bound for flight testing.

When it is deployed — probably sometime after 2015 — the J-15 will signal the dawn of a new ability by China to assert authority along its coastline.

The carrier and its jet are said to employ the best Chinese technology, but both are also direct descendants of weaponry devised in the dying days of the old Soviet Union.

China’s new carrier, expected to be christened the Shi Lang, is a retrofitted version of a 1988 Soviet aircraft carrier that Chinese interests bought from Ukraine after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, supposedly for conversion into a floating casino in Macao. But the Macao gambling license never materialized, and as many had suspected, the ship wound up elsewhere — in Dalian, a city in northeastern China where workers began a decade-long retrofit.

The J-15 has followed an even more tortuous route.

At the century’s turn, many news reports say, the Chinese beseeched Moscow to sell them a Sukhoi-33, a 1980s Soviet fighter capable of landing on carriers. Moscow refused. But in 2001, the Chinese bought an Su-33 prototype from Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, and began a teardown to learn its secrets.

The Russians were incensed.

Yet the J-15 unofficially unveiled this week, which externally seems a clone of the Su-33, in fact has been remade inside with Chinese improvements. Mr. Lan said that advances in the plane’s outdated avionics and missile-guidance systems had made it a far more sophisticated version of the Russian jet.

The J-15 is being compared in some quarters to the American F-18, a workhorse on Navy carriers. But Mr. Lan said it had a shorter range, in large part because its takeoff method — flying off a ski-jump-style runway — dictated that it could carry less fuel than a comparable American jet, which is propelled off a flat carrier runway.

Flying a ski-jump is not duck soup. And in February, a Ukrainian court convicted a Russian man of conspiring to give the Chinese details of a Crimean air base that had been used to train Su-33 pilots to take off from a carrier’s ski-jump ramp.

In Huludao, a navy installation on China’s northeast coast, workers are said to have built a rough clone of the Crimea test center, complete with a ski ramp for ascending jets.

None of this is exceptional. Russian, Chinese and American espionage agents wage unacknowledged wars to steal the others’ technology.

But the Chinese, some experts say, are notably adept.

“They take what they can get, and improve what they can,” Abraham M. Denmark, an independent expert on China’s military in Washington, said in an interview. “It’s a strategy that permeates many of their innovations.”

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The title might be misleading but the threat against Chinese working in Pakistan is real (here) (here). How to protect Chinese workers working overseas is a developing story this blog and others (such as Dr Andrew Erickson of the US Naval War College) are tracking.

ISLAMABAD: The Export-Import Bank of China will loan Pakistan $1.7 billion to develop a city-wide train system in the eastern city of Lahore, a senior Pakistani government official said on Wednesday.

The 15-year loan will be disbursed in the next five years, and negotiations with Eximbank are under way to finalise other details, Khawaja Ahmed Hassan, chairman of the Lahore Transport Company (LTC), said.

“The bank agreed to lend us the money with a two-year grace period, and our aim is to get it at six per cent interest,” he told Reuters.

The Punjab government recently agreed to award the 27 km (16.7 mile) train line contract project to the Chinese company China North Industries Corp (Norinco). In 2008, a French company had estimated the cost of the project at $2.4 billion.

The Chinese “were very kind and they brought down the cost of the project to $1.7 billion,” Hassan said.

He said the project was likely to begin by the end of 2011.

Lahore, the capital of Punjab province, Pakistan’s most populous and prosperous province, is home to more than five million people.

Officials expect the new transport system, the first of its kind in the country, will substantially decrease road traffic.

“There will be a big change. If we are able to bring here the system which we saw in China, thousands of vehicles (will) eventually go off the road,” Hafiz Nauman, a provincial lawmaker and senior member of the LTC, said.

He said another Chinese company will supply 111 buses to the city in June.

Seen as an “all-weather friend” to Pakistan, China has invested heavily in infrastructure development, particularly in the strategic and mineral-rich southwest, bordering Iran and Afghanistan.

China Three Gorges Corp, China’s largest hydropower developer, is ready to invest $15 billion in Pakistan’s troubled energy sector, an investment that could add 10,000 megawatts to Pakistan’s main grid over the next 10 years, a senior company official told Reuters in an interview on April 7.

China is a main supplier of military and defence hardware to Pakistan, and has helped the country build nuclear power plants.

Chinese military chief to visit U.S. in May
English.news.cn 2011-04-27 01:12:28

BEIJING, April 27 (Xinhua) -- Chen Bingde, chief of the general staff of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, will visit the United States in May, China's Ministry of Defense said late Tuesday.

"I will visit the United States next month at the invitation of Mike Mullen, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff. I look forward to having an in-depth and candid discussion with U.S. political and military leaders on bilateral military relations and other issues of common concern," Chen told a visiting U.S. congress delegation without announcing specific date.

The delegation was led by Charles Boustany and Rick Larsen, co-chairmen of the U.S.-China Working Group (USCWG) of the U.S. Congress, a group focused on educating members and staff about U.S.-China issues through meetings and briefings with academic, business and political leaders from the United States and China.

According to a release from the ministry, in his meeting with the delegation, Chen reviewed the successful state visit to the United States by Chinese President Hu Jintao in January, saying the important consensus between Hu and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama - building a partnership of mutual respect and win-win - showed the direction for bilateral military relations.

However, Chen stressed that U.S. arms sales to Taiwan was the "largest obstacle" in bilateral military relations.

"Given that historic changes have taken place in international strategic arena, the positioning of China-U.S. relations and the mainland-Taiwan relations, China hopes the United States would look at the arms sales issue from a broader perspective and take effective measures to rid it," said Chen.

Chen also praised USCWG's long commitment in promoting China-U.S. relations and increasing the the U.S. congress and people's understanding of China.

Boustany and Larsen acknowledged the importance of bilateral relationship, saying the two countries shared extensive mutual interests despite different political and cultural traditions.

"A stable, reliable military relationship is an important component of China-U.S. ties. Both sides should keep dialogue and exchanges and strengthen mutual understanding and trust," the two congressmen said, adding that USCWG will continue to advance relations.

After the delegation's visit to Beijing, they will visit the coastal city of Qingdao in east China and Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province.
Editor: Mu Xuequan

BEIJING — The J-15 Flying Shark is China’s newest attack jet, a sinuous fighter with the folding wings, shortened tail cone and bulked-up landing gear it needs to serve on China’s first aircraft carrier, which is expected to start sea trials soon. It is indisputable evidence of China’s growing mastery of military technology.

Also Russian and Ukrainian military technology, albeit not entirely with their consent.

Barely two weeks after splashing photographs of the aircraft carrier on the Internet, China’s state media published the first close-up pictures of the J-15 on Monday. The day before, Web sites that focus on China’s military had run the same photograph, snapped outside the Shenyang plant in northeast China where the plane is being developed.

Like the aircraft carrier it will call home, the jet faces years of tests and refinement before it will formally enter service, military analysts say. The photographs nevertheless suggest that the People’s Liberation Army, long notoriously secretive, is lifting some veils.

“The recent spate of releases of photographs of airplanes under development is a sign of relaxed control of military information in China,” Lan Yun, an editor at the Beijing-based Modern Ships magazine, said in an interview. “It could be seen as a sign of more transparency of the Chinese military.”

Mr. Lan and Andrei Chang, the Hong Kong-based editor of Kanwa Asian Defense Review, said that the photograph indicated that the aircraft had passed factory tests and was now bound for flight testing — probably, Mr. Chang said, at the Yunliang high-technology aviation center near Xi’an, in north-central China.

When it is deployed — probably sometime after 2015, when China’s new carrier is ready for service — the J-15 will signal the dawn of a new ability by China to assert authority along its coastline. Underscoring that, the navy is widely expected to christen the carrier the Shi Lang, the name of the Qing dynasty admiral who conquered the island now known as Taiwan in 1861.

The carrier and its jet are said to employ the best Chinese technology, but both are also direct descendants of weaponry devised in the dying days of the old Soviet Union.

China’s new carrier, officially called the Varyag, is a retrofitted version of a 1988 Soviet aircraft carrier that Chinese interests bought from Ukraine after the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union, supposedly for conversion into a floating casino in Macau. But the Macau gambling license never materialized, and as many had suspected, the ship wound up elsewhere — in Dalian, a city in northeastern China where workers began a decade-long retrofit.

The J-15 has followed an even more tortuous route.

At the century’s turn, many news reports say, the Chinese beseeched Moscow to sell them the Sukhoi-33, a 1980s Soviet fighter capable of landing on carriers. Moscow refused. But in 2001, the Chinese bought an Su-33 prototype from Ukraine, a former Soviet republic and began a teardown to learn its secrets.

The Russians were incensed. At the 2010 Farnborough Airshow, the publication Flight International reported, Sukhoi’s chief executive Mikhail Pogosyan admitted that China had produced a Su-33 copy, but said he was powerless to do much about it.

“No copy is equal to the original,” Mr. Pogosyan told the publication. “They do not have the technological capabilities that we have.”

Yet the J-15 unofficially unveiled this week, which externally seems a clone of the Su-33, in fact has been remade inside with Chinese improvements. Mr. Lan said that advances in the plane’s outdated avionics and missile-guidance systems had made it a far more sophisticated version of the original Russian jet.

The J-15 is being compared in some quarters to the American F-18, a workhorse on Navy carriers. But Mr. Lan said it has a shorter range, in large part because its takeoff method — flying off a ski-jump-style runway — dictated that it could carry less fuel than a comparable American jet, which is propelled off a flat carrier runway.

Flying a ski-jump is not duck soup. And in February, a Ukrainian court convicted a Russian man of conspiring to give the Chinese details of Crimean air base that had been used to train Su-33 pilots to take off from a carrier’s ski-jump ramp. In Huludao, a navy installation on the nation’s northeast coast, workers are said to have built a rough clone of the Crimea test center, complete with a ski ramp for ascending jets.

None of this is exceptional. Russian, Chinese and American espionage agents wage unacknowledged wars to steal the others’ technology, as do lesser powers.

But, the Chinese, some experts say, are notably adept. “They take what they can get, and improve what they can,” Abraham Denmark, an independent expert on China’s military in Washington, D.C., said in an interview. “It’s a strategy that permeates many of their innovations.”

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Keep in mind this is not a quality writing up from a questionable tabloid, it cited no official sources, amount to nothing short of mere speculation. I posted it as an excuse to share some of the more recent J-15 photos.

Unofficially dubbed the J-15, the new People's Liberation Army navy's "flying shark" features enlarged folding wings, twin nose wheels and an arresting hook for use on China's first aircraft carrier. Photo: Courtesy of netizen Zhang Xinliang

By Xu Tianran

Photos of a domestic-made shipborne J-15 heavy fighter were released on Sunday afternoon on Internet defense forums, prompting many military observers to coo about China's aircraft carrier capacity.

"Heavy shipborne fighters will boost the aircraft carrier fleet's air defense capability and enhance the fleet's strike ability," said Lan Yun, editor of the Modern Ships, a Beijing-based magazine following the latest developments in warships and defense equipment.

"They can carry many air-to-air missiles or air-to-surface missiles and other kinds of airborne munitions," Lan told the Global Times. "And they have the benefit of long combat radius."

The fighters are to be stationed onboard the Chinese Varyag aircraft carrier, which is under renovation in Dalian, according to defense media. The giant ship has had radars and electronic warfare equipment installed, the Canada-based Kanwa Daily News reported.

on Sunday's photos of the fighter were taken outside the airfield of the No. 112 Factory of Shenyang Aircraft Industry Corporation, a company of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), and were uploaded onto the cjdby.net and fyjs.cn military forums after 1:30 pm on Sunday.

Videos and smaller photos showing the fighter flying over Shenyang had been circulating on the Internet since June. This time the fighter was seen with a standard naval paint scheme, according to photos released on Sunday.

The fighter has distinctive features that enable it to operate on an aircraft carrier, such as folding wings and strengthened landing gear, according to the Chinese Military Aviation (CMA).

Missile launch rails and wide-angle holographic Head Up Display (HUD) clearly indicated that the fighter is equipped with domestic sensors, avionics and weapon systems, the website reported, just like later models of the Shenyang J-11 fighter. The fighter dubbed J-15 is based on a Russian Su-33 in terms of structural configuration, it also said.

The Russian Ria Novosti news quoted a Russian military analyst saying that China's J-15 is inferior to the Russian aircraft.

Lan Yun refuted the claim.

"The sensors, avionics and missiles of the Su-33 are already obsolete," Lan said, adding that the Chinese airborne electronics could offer more advanced technologies.

The first prototype J-15 was believed to have made its maiden flight on August 31, 2009, a month before the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, according to the Russian Ria Novosti news.

Lin Zuoming, AVIC general manager, published a poem in the China Aviation News newspaper one day later, celebrating the "breakthrough of scientific research."

on Sunday's photos came at about the same time as foreign media quoted a Chinese blogger claiming a Vertical/Short Take-Off and Landing (V/STOL) shipborne fighter for the Varyag is conducting flight tests in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the US-based Defense News. The foreign reports were dismissed by an AVIC spokesman as pure speculation on April 18.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Not sure they are promoting tourism with the PLAN or promoting the PLAN with tourism. It does not make sense either way.

Contestants arrive at the Lushun Railway Station in Dalian, northeast China's Liaoning Province, April 20, 2011. A welcome ceremony of the Miss Tourism Queen International China Final 2011 was held at the Lushun Railway Station on Wednesday. (Xinhua/Jiang Bing)

[Pakistan test-fires Hatf-IX]
RAWALPINDI: Pakistan on Tuesday successfully test-fired a newly-developed short-range surface-to-surface nuclear-capable missile, according to an official announcement by the Pakistan Army. The multi-tube ballistic missile, Hatf-IX (Nasr), is a 60-km range missile that has been developed to add deterrence value at shorter ranges to Pakistan’s Strategic Weapons Development Programme. The missile has been developed with shoot-and-scoot capability. The test was conducted from an unidentified location.

“The Nasr ballistic missile carries nuclear warheads of appropriate yield with high accuracy and shoot-and-scoot attributes. This quick response system addresses the need to deter evolving threats,” said the official announcement.

Director General Strategic Plans Division (SPD), Lieutenant General (retd) Khalid Ahmed Kidwai, Chairman Nescom, Irfan Burney, senior officers from the strategic forces, scientists and engineers of strategic organisations were present at the undisclosed site of the test.

Strategic planners term the test a ‘new and very significant development’ since the missile falls in the category of tactical nuclear weapons. “This is a low-yield battlefield deterrent, capable of deterring and inflicting punishment on mechanised forces like armed brigades and divisions,” said an expert in the field of missile technology. “This takes care of the Indian Army’s obsession with finding space for limited war under the nuclear umbrella.”

Addressing the gathering at the undisclosed location, DG SPD Kidwai said the test was a very important milestone in consolidating Pakistan’s strategic deterrence capability at all levels of the threat spectrum. He said in the hierarchy of military operations, the Nasr Weapon System now provided Pakistan with short-range missile capability in addition to the already available medium- and long-range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles in its inventory.

The president and prime minister have congratulated the scientists and engineers for their outstanding success and warmly appreciated the successful test.